In Lodi, wine comes first. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. Meet the passionate people behind our handcrafted wines and gnarly old vines.

Six Hands Winery has just released a 2013 Six Hands Cresci Vineyard Lodi Chenin Blanc ($16) that is as dry as a desert, yet gushy in varietal perfumes of wild honey, green melon, white flowers and underlying minerality. On the palate, the first impression is a lemony crisp snappiness, followed by a silky smooth glycerol feel extending into a bone dry finish: very contemporary in its fine, clean, appealingly spare lines, with an emphasis on flowery fruit rather than alcoholic weight or oak (the wine's silky texture resulting from brief aging and lees contact in neutral oak barrels, following stainless...

At Lodi's Tin Roof BBQ it's all about barbecue. Gloriously meaty, outdoor-smoky, not-too-fatty and not-too-sweetie barbecue, which is exactly the way that owner/chef Richard Berardi likes it. Mr. Berardi started up Tin Roof BBQ nine years ago on Guild Avenue in the east side of town as, strangely enough, someone who didn't like barbecue. "I'm a refugee from an Italian restaurant family," he tells us, "and if there's one thing you know about Italians, they're always fighting… I wanted to get away from all that dysfunction and do something different." And so barbecue it was. The beauty of this...

“Lodi” was also on Creedance Clearwater Revival’s 1969 Green River album

Oh, lord… Although it was the "B" side of Creedence Clearwater Revival's 1969 single record, "Bad Moon Rising" (which peaked at No. 52 on the Top 100 singles charts), in many ways the song "Lodi" has endured as one of the group's catchiest, most memorable tunes – its story line (being "stuck" in a nowheresville town), one that almost anyone can identify with. But it was never a true story. As it turns out, CCR's founding leader and songwriter, John Fogerty, never actually slept, or got stuck, in Lodi. As far as anyone knows, he still hasn't, to this day...

This past June 14, 2014, when the California State Fair announced the top awards resulting from its famously rigorous wine judging taking place in Sacramento each year, one Lodi winery loomed significantly among the winners: Lodi's Michael David Winery. Michael David's two awards: "Best Petite Sirah" – 2012 Michael David Earthquake Lodi Petite Sirah ($26) "Best Lodi Red" – 2012 Michael David Inkblot Lodi Cabernet Franc ($35) Michael David is easily the largest of Lodi's premium wineries; having grown from just a couple thousand cases in the early nineties to over 450,000 cases produced each year. Today, Michael David's brands...

Who'd have thunk? That a planting by a retired Lodi schoolteacher and longtime home winemaker would become the largest, most serious collection (over 40 cultivars!) of German and Austrian grapes in the U.S. The grape bug took a big bite out of Bob Koth in the early nineties, when he and his wife Mary Lou Koth started traveling back and forth to Germany, where their daughter Ann-Marie was studying on a Fulbright scholarship. Although Germany is a good, Alpine obstructed distance away from the Mediterranean Sea – and Lodi's dry-summer subtropical climate is classified as Mediterranean (similar in temperature to...